Five Ways to Tackle Your E-Discovery Quandary

Mark Karnick shares insights about the tech issues of preserving, collecting and producing digital information during a lawsuit’s discovery process.

5) Enforce data retention (and destruction) policies—A comprehensive data retention policy sets clear guidelines not just for data retention but also for data destruction: when and how data is NOT to be retained. IT personnel are naturally reluctant to destroy data, so if you don’t have an ironclad data retention policy, you’ll find years-old data stores that were kept on hand “just in case.” This recently occurred with one of our clients, which still had old backup tapes for a hardware system that had long since been discarded. It cost the client a small fortune to recover the data from those tapes, but because the client was obligated to produce all relevant data, it had no choice.

Managing e-discovery resources in a corporate IT environment represents a new challenge, but it need not be a source of anxiety for CIOs. Being an e-discovery savvy CIO doesn’t require a law degree, but it does require knowledge of how the available tools and processes can fit within your organization, and an awareness of the importance of properly managing your organization’s electronic documents.

About the Author

Mark Karnick is the CIO at Glaser Weil Fink Jacobs Howard Avchen & Shapiro LLP in Los Angeles. He earned his Master of Science degree in Technology Management from Pepperdine University and is a relativity certified administrator, LAW prediscovery certified administrator, OpenText certified DOCS administrator and a Microsoft certified systems engineer.